College can be stressful. Grad school can be very stressful. Medical school can be double-special stressful.

With this in mind, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore recently became part of a program designed to help students quiet their minds.

In October 2017, the university partnered with meditation app Calm to offer a free annual subscription to anyone with a Johns Hopkins email address: students, faculty, and staff alike.

The idea was to provide easy, super-convenient health and wellness help to those in all levels of stressful situations.

“Over the past handful of years at campuses nationwide, anxiety has overtaken depression as the number-one presenting concern,” says Matthew Torres, executive director of the Counseling Center at Hopkins. “But we’re not always talking about diagnosable anxiety. It could be various forms of stress, nervousness, public speaking—things that aren’t really diagnoses but experiences.”

Like similar facilities at many schools, Torres’ Counseling Center offers wellness resources like videos, programs, and TED Talks about everything from mindfulness meditation to yoga as healing. And the opportunity to offer the total package in a single app—and for free—was too good to pass up. 

“We offered in-person types of yoga and meditation,” says Toni Blackwell, senior associate dean of students. “But this is the first time we looked at an app like Calm.”

The school publicized the initiative through flyers and posters, as well as via social media, email blasts, and good old word of mouth, to get as many people involved as possible.

It worked. According to Calm data, more than 10,000 Johns Hopkins University students—across undergrad, graduate, and medical schools—have used Calm since October 2017. JHU users have listened to more than 250,000 meditation and sleep sessions.

Eden Metzger is one of those students. A rising junior who’s on track to graduate a year early, she admits to “thriving on being busy,” and her schedule includes (deep breath) three research positions, a job as a student-event ambassador, and a spot playing electric bass in an alt-rock cover band. 

Calm, she says, helped her almost immediately. “When you’ve been working nonstop for a long time, you don’t realize how much your body carries the weight of your stress,” she says. “Even taking three or four minutes has an effect. I’m not walking back to my room with my shoulders all tight.”

According to Calm, the most utilized content type was Meditations, followed by Sleep Stories. “One of the things we heard was that students were struggling with the sleep piece,” says Blackwell. “Calm took advantage of both the meditation and sleep component, which we really liked.” 

Most impressive, the retention rate is around 65 percent, meaning that two-thirds of active users are maintaining the habit. 

In fact, it all worked so well that when the project wrapped after its initial year, Torres and Blackwell immediately heard from students. “Several groups, including the student government association, actively lobbied to have it continued,” Torres says. “It had become a valuable resource, and they didn’t want it taken away.” 

The program has continued, on the school’s dime, for what Blackwell says is a very simple reason: “We’re meeting the students where they are. We, as educators, can always do more of that.”